Higher Education in a Post-vaccine World

By Claudia Neuhauser, Ph.D., Associate Vice President of Research and Technology Transfer, Professor of Mathematics, University of Houston; and Brian Herman, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering and former Vice President for Research, University of Minnesota and University of Texas Health, San Antonio.

When the Director of the CDC, Dr. Redfield, said in September that face coverings might be more effective at protecting against COVID-19 than a vaccine, we should all have paused. What he essentially told us is that even with a vaccine, the pandemic might not end, and we will need to figure out how to live with the virus. What does this mean for colleges and universities?

It became clear early on that the pandemic could not be controlled in the United States. In response, to avoid outbreaks on campuses, colleges moved their classes online in March or April for the remainder of the spring semester. This change, previously thought impossible, happened overnight on many campuses and left faculty scrambling to convert their courses to something that was at least acceptable.

Fall wasn’t much different. Most campuses could not figure out how to open safely and offered most or all courses online. Those that opened to most or all students often saw early outbreaks despite elaborate plans of public hygiene (wearing masks, hand washing, social distancing) as well as robust testing, isolation, treatment plans of ill students, and contact tracing, and ended up moving back to online or hybrid education.

Universities continued to charge full tuition as if students were on campus. Although what they were able to offer was often a pale imitation of their former self, reducing tuition was not an option. Moving online resulted in a steep decline in income. There was no longer a need for residence halls, dining, and parking, but the costs remained. These services are all part of auxiliary services that are generally self-supporting. The losses are significant: Auxiliary services make up a sizable fraction of a university’s budget, about 9.6% of total expenses across all 4-year institutions in 2018. On top of this, a significant number of students decided to defer enrollment this fall semester, resulting in a further loss of income. These financial challenges are reflected in Moody’s outlook on colleges and universities that was changed to negative in March after a short reprieve at the end of last year when the outlook was changed from negative to stable.

Public Research Universities

There are close to 4,000 public and private non-profit institutions of higher education in the United States that enrolled over 22 million undergraduate students in 2018. Most institutions tend to be small to medium size, with a median size of a few thousand students. These include the many small liberal arts colleges that may be able to return to the previous model of a residential college with good testing and contact tracing protocols once there is a vaccine, and the COVID-19 incidence is low. The same may be true of community colleges where classes tend to be smaller, and students often spend only a very limited amount of time on campus.

There is one group of institutions, however, that tends to have large campuses with tens of thousands of students. These are the 262 research universities that are classified as very high (R1) or high (R2) research intensity by the Carnegie classification. They enrolled a total of 4.8 million undergraduate students in 2018 or about 21.4% of all undergraduate students. Out of the 262 R1 and R2 institutions, 184 are public, and almost 4.1 million out of the 4.8 million undergraduate students attended one of the public research universities, with almost three-quarters of them ages 18–21. Among the 100 largest research universities, all but five are public, and the number of undergraduate students on those campuses ranges from 20,000 to well over 60,000.

Because of their size and demographics, public research universities will find it particularly difficult to return to the pre-pandemic model of education. Large crowds are inevitable once tens of thousands of students are on campus every day, spending time in the classroom together, socializing on and off campus, and often living in crowded residence halls.

Even under low-risk scenarios when the incidence rate is in the low single digits per 100,000, a campus with 50,000 students could expect to have new infections every day, including students who are asymptomatic but capable of spreading the virus. The close proximity of people on campus provides an ideal environment for the virus to spread quickly, even at very low incidence rates.

There is not only the spread on campus when classes are in session. Universities might also end up serving as a continual source of new infections when students return home during and at the end of the semester. We may witness this in earnest this fall when the combination of flu and COVID-19 could result in surging infections. Many campuses are planning to send their students home at Thanksgiving for the rest of the semester. This strategy will eliminate the potential of another outbreak on campus after Thanksgiving but has the potential to bring the virus back to their home communities. If this happens, the fingers will likely be pointed at colleges, and they will be asked to take measures in the future to avoid the potential for bringing COVID-19 back to the students’ home communities when students return.

Online Education Is Not a Solution

Last spring, moving to remote operation for research and education was an emergency measure. Research universities quickly realized that research could be brought back safely since labs are typically small, and not everyone always has to be in the lab. Remote education, however, continued not only during the spring and summer, but many institutions offered classes online or in hybrid mode during the fall semester as well. Discussions are now underway on what to do in Spring 2021. Since a vaccine will not be widely available anytime soon, it is likely that Spring 2021 will not be much different from Fall 2020.

Even with a vaccine, it will be difficult to keep the virus off our campuses when hundreds of students sit next to each other during large lecture classes. Should we continue with using remote education as a major solution to the COVID-19 situation? This would represent a radical rethinking of how we deliver education and would be challenging since most faculty are not trained in developing effective online courses, and keeping students’ interest during remote learning experiences is very difficult. It would be tempting to do, however, since it may be financially beneficial to colleges not only in response to COVID-19 but in the longer term as well, especially for large introductory courses.

With moving to online lectures, additional savings could come from course sharing across institutions, and colleges are now actively looking to share courses online via online course-sharing consortia (e.g., Eureka college and Acadeum, Council of Independent Colleges’ (CIC’s) Online Course Sharing Consortium, The Big Ten Academic Alliance, and the University of Massachusetts inter-campus course exchange). These arrangements have the benefit that courses offered by those in the consortia count fully towards degree requirements at any of the participating members. Since students remain enrolled in their university even if the course originates at another member institution, students receive their financial aid package from their home institution and pay their home institution’s tuition for the consortium courses.

However, on the downside, delivering college education online and expecting the same outcomes, especially in the first two years of undergraduate education, is unrealistic. Many of the freshmen in research universities are fresh out of high school. Expecting them to be self-motivated and study without having peers close by doing the same is a pipe dream. They still need daily contact with their peers and professors to reinforce the need to keep up with homework and studying. We know about this from experience.

Research universities realized the need for a higher-touch approach in the 1990s when graduation rates were low (43% in public institutions and 54% in private institutions), and Congress passed the Student Right-to-Know Act, which required “institutions of higher education receiving Federal financial assistance to provide certain information with respect to the graduation rates of student-athletes at such institutions.” In the years since then, public research universities have increased on-campus housing and started first-year programs that helped significantly in the retention of first-year students. This then translated into increases in graduation rates. 6-year graduation rates for the 2012 starting cohort was 59.7% for public institutions and 67.2% for private non-profit institutions. These gains are at risk if we move online, especially in the first two years of a college education.

The Undergraduate College

The current financial model of research universities relies on large class sizes in the first couple of years to pay for small classes in the upper-division and graduate or professional education. This would need to change if we can no longer offer large enrollment courses, and online isn’t an option. The main problem is how to reduce the density of students on and off campus sufficiently to lower the risk of the spread of COVID-19 to acceptable levels without bankrupting the institution.

We believe that expanding the physical footprint of the flagship campus to multiple geographic locations for lower-division students might be the solution. This may sound counterintuitive since maintaining brick and mortar universities is costly, and many colleges and universities already struggle with a deferred maintenance backlog and lack of funding to maintain their aging infrastructure.

The expansion could take the form of an Undergraduate College. Students would attend the first two years in the Undergraduate College and choose a major by the end of the second year. If the lower division curriculum is taught in locations that are closer to home where the students live, the physical infrastructure could be a lot less expensive. If the location is rural, perhaps a community college that is struggling to maintain enrollment could be used. If the location is urban, the many now empty office buildings and malls could serve as classroom and study spaces.

A mall might sound strange, but this is what one of us was involved in when the University of Minnesota built a new campus in Rochester, Minnesota. The campus was on the top two floors of a shopping mall in the middle of Rochester. The central location eliminated the need to build our own dining facilities, residence halls, and gym. Partnerships with the community provided savings and brought more business to the community. With the move to working from home in many companies, it is likely that less expensive real estate will become available that can be turned into learning spaces without large investments.

The financial model of a research university would change along with a new pedagogical model. Gone would be the days where every professor at a research university has a low teaching load with the expectation of producing original works in their discipline. Research would become a privilege, and professors who are no longer research productive would see an increase in their teaching load. However, it is unlikely that these Undergraduate Colleges would become resting places for uninspiring and unproductive professors. Most professors love teaching and interacting with students, and it would allow those who are more inspired by teaching young minds than pursuing their own research to contribute their share to the academy.

Undergraduate Colleges would offer pedagogical opportunities and different learning models for different students. They would likely become a place for faculty with strong educational and disciplinary interests. They would be able to combine their research interests in education and their discipline and focus on developing effective lower-division curricula that can then be disseminated across the nation to the benefit of all. Not everyone would have to engage in educational research, though everyone would have to be a committed teacher and willing to follow evidence-based teaching practices. Since it is doubtful that large lectures would be one of the pedagogical recommendations, the implementation of good pedagogical practices might take care of the risk of spreading COVID-19 that is inherent in large lecture classes where hundreds of students sit in close proximity to each other.

Undergraduate Colleges could have other advantages. They could deliver core curricula that are transferable among clusters of majors and would allow students to find a suitable major without necessarily ending up with a lot of credits that don’t count if they decide on a different major. This is, in essence, what we did on the Rochester campus of the University of Minnesota. Students were prepared for entering the health sciences with a lower division curriculum that offered few choices but instead allowed for integration across different disciplines since all students were taking the same courses.

The Undergraduate College model would reduce the density on the main campus where research labs and graduate or professional education would continue largely unchanged. The main campus would see juniors and seniors in their respective majors who would be taught in smaller courses, as is currently already the case in many majors. Any large lectures in upper-division courses could be moved online since by then, students are more mature and have developed better study habits.

Since infrastructure is expensive to maintain and some of the services scale with the number of people on campus, universities would be able to gain savings by reducing their square footage and personnel on the main campus. Some of the space could also be repurposed and turned into study spaces that are frequently in low supply. The existing large classrooms would no longer be needed and could be turned into active learning classrooms where students could collaborate in smaller groups that are physically separated.

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